Is Personal Cloud As Disruptive As Personal Computer?

IT organizations are apt to react as badly to the 21st century's PC as they did to the 20th century's PC. Help them get over it.

When I first read about Western Digital's "personal cloud" for consumer storage, I didn't think much of it. It was just a NAS with some clever apps that provided remote access features. But I'm now predicting that a more pervasive distribution of personally owned compute and storage assets will change the face of IT as we know it. Here's why:

The Snowden effectThe revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of NSA spying on, well, everyone have led to public distrust of the government, the major providers of public cloud services, and even the basic security protocols of the Internet. If privacy-minded folks have an easy alternative to "protocols invented with the help of government agencies" or "software created by those we now distrust" -- in the form of private clouds -- they'll take them.

Honey, I shrunk the NASSeagate's new Kinetic architecture, whereby hard drives can be directly attached to Ethernet without a server, is a game changer. If it's widely adopted, it will change the building blocks of networked storage by making each drive into a network node, so that file objects can be stored or retrieved based on a unique ID.

Although vendors are aiming serverless hard drives and associated support apps at enterprise users, once startups start tinkering with these systems, an individual will have the redundancy of Amazon S3 with the physical security of a home NAS. What if you could put a couple of hard drives at your brother Larry's house, and your home routers had apps on them that made sure that those hard drives synced with the ones at your house? Combine that setup with Western Digital's "data anywhere" platform, and all of a sudden your data is physically secure.

Open-source software meets the maker movement and crowdfundingThe only way you can really know that a protocol implementation doesn't have back doors is to use open source. Some might say that an open-source cloud stack isn't sustainable, but the Linux market taught us that even though the horse we bet on might not win, the essential open-source product will continue on in some shape or form (think SuSE versus RedHat). Just as open-source Linux has shown up in video disc players, home routers, and other consumer products, expect open-source cloud computing to show up in consumer devices.

It's also entirely reasonable to assume that new consumer devices will arrive specifically to scratch the itch of individuals who want the government and multinational companies to "stop watching us."

The Google fiber effectThe bane of the personal Internet and the future personal cloud is asynchronous bandwidth -- you can download but not upload at high speeds. That's about to change. Google's fiber optic networking effort isn't just about providing synchronous broadband to Kansas City, Kansas; Austin, Texas; and Provo, Utah. It has also galvanized the telecom industry and kicked economic development pros into high gear now that they realize that cities such as Chattanooga, Tenn., are luring businesses away from them by creating commercial incubators centered on gigabit infrastructure. These new networks certainly will be speedy enough in both directions to support personal cloud computing.

No doubt, the notion of company employees moving all kinds of data into personally owned compute and storage clouds will freak out IT control freaks as much as employees doing the same with their personally owned devices. But "bring your own compute" and "bring your own storage" are going to happen, and the question is: Will it hit you unawares, or will you plan for it?

The best shield against any rogue IT activities in the enterprise will continue to be the IT organization's credibility. Specifically, IT organizations must continue to engage with fellow employees in activities that make it clear that delivering value to business units and being a good partner is their number one charge -- not arbitrary control freakishness.

If individuals think that their IT colleagues are punishers and not enablers, they'll avoid having these conversations and delight in bypassing IT's controls. If these same individuals feel that IT helps them to figure out how to use the latest personal productivity technology safely and within the organization's rules, they'll seek IT's opinion before using those new tools, personal cloud or otherwise.

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The key sentence here is this one: "The best shield against any rogue IT activities in the enterprise will continue to be the IT organization's credibility." IT organizations need to join the personal cloud conversation, just as they have the BYOD conversation.

Rob – you hit it on the head. If IT is seen as credible, seen as engaging and willing to provide the tools, social and collaborative, that truly enhance productivity, then people will have less need to "do it on their own." But with the power of BYOD (device), BYOA (Applications) and BYOS (storage) and more, users must heed the words of Ben Parker, "With great power comes great responsibility." Users need to exercise their personal responsibility (even if they can't walk on walks and shoot webs).

Yeah, IT needs to keep a cooperative and credible attitude toward user activity. But the stakes keep getting higher. With bring your own storage, key company data can migrate outside the company's walls and be stored, or shared, in all the wrong ways. With great access to data comes increased responsibility. Most employees are equal to the charge. But then, there's always a few rogue cases where you don't know what will happen.

Charlie, the stakes do indeed keep getting higher. But that's just one influence. Another counterinfluence is, "as the consumer goes, so does the enterprise," which I wrote about on my blog when I first started thinking about this. (http://feldman.org/blog/rise-personal-cloud/)

Many people SAY that it doesn't matter what the price point is, the enterprise must spend what it takes to protect data or compute. But the reality is that enterprises are just as sensitive to price points as anyone else. Remember the enterprise-targeted 802.11a? Essentially no adoption. Why? In my view, crushed by the low price point of 802.11b (consumer) chips. My point: no matter what the stakes are, if "personal cloud" becomes pervasive in the consumer space, we'd better expect it to trickle in to the enterprise. And we're going to need that credibility that Rob talked about as well as the business partner and coworker cooperation that you describe.

Enterprise cloud adoption has evolved to the point where hybrid public/private cloud designs and use of multiple providers is common. Who among us has mastered provisioning resources in different clouds; allocating the right resources to each application; assigning applications to the "best" cloud provider based on performance or reliability requirements.